In part three of my XKCD font saga I generated several hundred glyphs as PPM images, and classified them with their associated character(s). In this instalment, I will convert the raster glyphs into vector form (SVG) and then generate a rudimentary font using FontForge. If you'd like to follow …
In part two of my XKCD font saga I was able to separate strokes from the XKCD handwriting dataset into many smaller images. I also handled the easier cases of merging some of the strokes back together - I particularly focused on "dotty" or "liney" type glyphs, such as i, !, % and …
In part one of XKCD font saga I gave some background on the XKCD handwriting dataset, and took an initial look at image segmentation in order to extract the individual strokes from the scanned image. In this instalment, I will apply the technique from part 1, as well as attempting …
The XKCD font (as used by matplotlib et al.) recently got an update to include lower-case characters. For some time now I have been aware of a handwriting sample produced by Randall Munroe (XKCD's creator) that I was interested in exploring. The ultimate aim is to automatically produce a font-file …
This evening I'm going to take a different approach to how I would normally blog. Rather than reporting the results of a technical investigation or highlighting a new/shiny package, I wanted to paint a realistic picture of the technical exploration process. As it happens, this particular investigation consumed a …
Conda is awesome - it is a simple package manager which allows me to create isolated software environments much like virtualenv. Unlike virtualenv though it can handle any package type, not just python ones. The more I use it, the more I want to make use of conda's dependency tracking for …
After what feels like years chipping away at the problem, not least from some awesome developers including the whole of the IPython development team, Michael Droetboom and Jason Grout, I recently closed the development loop and added a new matplotlib backend providing interactive figures in the IPython notebook environment. The …
I often deal with huge gridded datasets which either stretch or indeed are beyond the limits of my computer's memory. In the past I've implemented a couple of workarounds to help me handle this data to extract meaningful analyses from them. One of the most intuitive ways of reducing gridded …
When dealing with colours in scientific visualisations some people like to have a colourmap which can be indexed into to pick specific colours. Whilst this isn't necessarily the best way of handling colours in matplotlib, it certainly adds a degree of familiarity to users who have come over from other …
I recently added a new function to matplotlib to make it easier to draw pseudo-colour plots given specific levels and colours, in exactly the same way as you can with contour and contourf. In [2]: import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib.colors import from_levels_and_colors cmap …